Diagnose Failed Jobs
Use these guidelines and features to begin the process of diagnosing jobs that have failed.
Job Types
The following types of jobs can be executed in the Alteryx Analytics Cloud:
Conversion jobs: Some datasources, such as binary file or JSON formats, must be converted to a format that can be easily read by the Trifacta Application. During data ingestion, the datasource is converted to a natively supported file format and stored on backend storage.
Transform job: This type of job executes the defined transformations against your source datasets to generate results in the specified format. When you configure your job, any set of selected output formats causes a transform job to execute according to the job settings.
Profile job: This type of job builds a visual profile of the generated results. When you configure your job, select Profile Results to generate a profile job.
Publish job: This job publishes results generated by the platform to a different location or datastore.
Ingest job: This job manages the import of data from a JDBC source into the default datastore for purposes of running a transform or sampling job.
Note
For each collected sample, a sample job ID is generated. In the Samples panel, you can view the sample job IDs for your samples. These job IDs enable you to identify the sample jobs in the Sample Jobs page.
Identify Job Failures
When a job fails to execute, a failure message appears in the Job History page:
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Figure: Publish job failed
In the above example, the Transform and Profile jobs completed, but the Publish job failed. In this case, the results exist and, if the source of the problem is diagnosed, they can be published separately.
Invalid file paths
When your job uses files as inputs or outputs, you may receive invalid file path errors. Depending on the backend datastore, these can be one of the following:
Path to the file is invalid for the current user. Path may be been created by another user that had access to the location.
Path contains invalid characters in it. For more information, see Supported File Formats.
Resource was deleted.
Jobs that Hang
In some cases, a job may stay in a pending state indefinitely. Typically, these errors are related to a failure of the job tracking service. You can try to the following:
Resubmit the job.
Cloud-based EMR Job Errors
These errors can occur when you are running an EMR job from a cloud-based product edition.
"Runtime AWS" error
There was an error running your job.
"Runtime timeout" error
Your job was terminated for reaching the timeout minutes limit in the product. Job execution time is affected by the size of your input dataset(s) and the complexity of your recipe(s).
Tips:
Review your recipes to see if you can identify ways to break them up into smaller recipes.
Operations such as joins and unions can greatly increase the size of your datasets.
Try Other Job Options
You can try to re-execute the job using different options.
Tips:
Disable flow optimizations. If your job is using data from a relational source that supports pushdowns, you can try to disable flow optimizations and then re-run the job. For more information, see Flow Optimization Settings Dialog.
Look to cut data volume. Some job failures occur due to high data volumes. For jobs that execute across a large dataset, you can re-examine your data to remove unneeded rows and columns of data. Use the Deduplicate transformation to remove duplicate rows.
Gather a new sample. In some cases, jobs can fail when run at scale because the sample displayed in the Transformer page did not include problematic data. If you have modified the number of rows or columns in your dataset, you can generate a new sample, which might illuminate the problematic data. However, gathering a new sample may fail as well, which can indicate a broader problem.
Change the running environment. If the job failed on Trifacta Photon, try executing it on another running environment.
Tip
The Trifacta Photon running environment is not suitable for jobs on large datasets. Use the default running environment to execute your job.
Download Error Report
When a job fails, you can download an error report, which can be useful for diagnosing issues:
Tip
If you are filing a request with Alteryx Support, please be sure to include this error report. Additionally, please provide the information available in the About > Report issue dialog.
Login to the Trifacta Application as an admin or the user who created the job.
Click the Jobs link in the left navigation bar.
In the Job History page, click the identifier for the job that failed.
In the Overview tab, review the Failed Stages entry or entries.
To acquire the error report, click Download error report. Review and forward the report as needed.
For each job in the failing job group, the error report contains:
Item | Description |
|---|---|
jobGroupId | The internal job identifier within the workspace where the error occurred. This value matches the job ID that is displayed in the Trifacta Application |
workspaceId | The identifier of the workspace where the error occurred Tip The workspace-person combination of identifiers provides a unique ID for the account where the error occurred. |
jobId | The ID for the specific job in the job group. These jobs can include sampling, profiling, transformation, writing results, ingesting data, and more. Tip Individual job identifiers can be helpful in identifying specific problem areas. |
personId | The internal identifier of the user within the workspace |
status | The status of the job, such as "Failed", "Completed", "Pending". |
errorMessageId | The ID of the error message that is shown in the UI. |
errorTimestamp | Timestamp of the job failure. Not included if no error occurs for the job. |
uiErrorMessage | Error message that is shown in the job UI. Not included if no error occurs for the job. |
Contact Support
If you are unable to diagnose your job failure, please contact Alteryx Support.
Report an Issue
If you believe that your job has failed due to an issue with the Alteryx Analytics Cloud, select Resources menu > Report issue. Copy your session information to the clipboard and paste it into an email to Alteryx Support.